The morning after Ajuka’s visit, I sat in the middle of the east courtyard, a cup of tea cooling beside me and a notebook balanced on my knee.
Half its pages were cluttered with crossed-out ideas.
I’d been at it since dawn.
The trouble with Annihilation Maker was, it didn’t come with a manual.
It came with hunger.
I’d felt it the moment I properly acknowledged it, three days ago.
Not malevolent.
Not exactly.
More like a dog that hadn’t been walked in a very long time, pressing its nose against the back of my ribs.
Make something.
Make something.
Make something.
“Alright,” I muttered to the empty courtyard.
“Let’s see what you can do.”
The first attempt was humbling.
I’d been thinking about the Cloak — about conceptual invisibility, the idea of being unnoticed rather than unseen — and wondering if AM could translate that into a living construct.
What came out was a translucent blob the size of a pillow that immediately ate a flagstone and sat there looking guilty.
I stared at it.
It stared back, if a featureless translucent mass could be said to stare.
“No,” I said.
“Absolutely not.
Back.”
I dissolved it.
Took a breath.
Started again.
Creation had a way of demanding precision.
I’d understood that in theory, but it hit differently when a gelatinous disaster was actively devouring the courtyard.
I needed to think less like a wizard and more like a biologist—or maybe an engineer—or, honestly, like someone who’d spent way too much time reading about invisible monsters.
What does an invisibility construct actually need to do?
I wrote it out.
– Bend light around itself and whatever it’s covering.
– Suppress aura signature — not just visual, aura-blind too.
– Passive.
Low maintenance.
Shouldn’t need to think hard to exist.
– Small enough to be unobtrusive.
Useful enough to matter.
I looked at the list.
I thought about decorator crabs, draped in anemones and seaweed until they looked like part of the reef.
I thought about how a skilled stage magician could make your eyes glance past what was important.
I thought about the light-bending cells in cephalopod skin — chromatophores shifting in real time, a living, breathing display.
Then I reached into the warm, hungry space behind my sternum and built.
What came out this time was small.
Palm-sized.
Something like a flattened starfish made of smoke and suggestion, its edges blurring where they met the air.
It didn’t eat anything.
I held my hand out.
It crawled onto my palm, and the back of my hand went somewhere else, like my eye refused to commit to it being there.
I tilted my hand back and forth and watched my perception slide off the construct and the skin beneath it like water off glass.
“Huh,” I said.
I set it on the flagstone it hadn’t eaten.
Stepped back ten paces.
Looked.
There was a flagstone.
Just a flagstone.
I went back, crouched down, felt the slight temperature difference of a living thing, and picked it up.
“You’ll do,” I said.
“I’m calling you a Veil.”
The Veil made no response, being a creature of pure function, and I decided this was a virtue.
By midday I had four of them.
They picked it up fast—though “picked it up” didn’t quite fit; they adapted, which felt more accurate and a bit more unnerving.
By the third one I’d made, they had figured out how to extend their effect to anything they touched.
By the fourth, they were coordinating on their own, fanning out to cover more ground between them.
I watched the four of them arrange themselves around the courtyard’s perimeter and quietly render the whole space into something the eye slid past without registering.
“That’s either wonderful or alarming,” I said, mostly to myself.
“I haven’t decided.”
I dissolved them.
I could feel the decision — not pain exactly, more like returning borrowed warmth.
They went without complaint.
Annihilation Maker noted the templates.
That part I understood instinctively: I wouldn’t have to build from scratch next time.
The next problem was the notice-me-not.
This was more delicate than invisibility, because invisibility was physical.
Notice-me-not was psychological.
I was essentially trying to build an ambient aversion field, the magical equivalent of that feeling when you walk into a room and forget why.
First attempt: a moth-like thing that produced a low hum.
Worked on me for about four seconds before I walked directly into a wall.
“Too strong,” I said, rubbing my nose.
“Dial it back.”
Second attempt: same shape, gentler effect.
I watched it circle me slowly, noticing how my attention kept drifting toward the overgrown jasmine along the east wall.
The moth was subtly altering my focus—not erasing it, just giving it a little nudge.
Better.
Third attempt, I gave it legs, made it smaller — something like a walking stick insect crossed with a compass needle, so it could cling to cloth or hair or the shoulder of a passing person and just…
redirect attention elsewhere.
I set it on my own wrist and walked toward the library.
Three times, I found myself veering toward the courtyard instead.
As if the library wasn’t where I meant to go.
I overcorrected, made it to the library, sat down, and stared at the insect on my wrist.
“You’re annoying,” I informed it.
“Perfect.”
Harbinger, I decided.
Because it heralded the absence of attention.
The ward constructs were the most straightforward, which didn’t mean they were easy.
I’d been thinking about the estate’s defenses — or lack of them — since I’d arrived.
The family circle in the basement was functional but passive, like a lock without a locksmith.
I needed something active.
Something that could monitor, assess, and respond.
The model I reached for was territorial fish, the ones that guarded reef sections with disproportionate aggression.
Something that understood the concept of boundary.
What AM produced was roughly the size and shape of a horseshoe crab, flat and armored, dragging itself slowly along walls and floors with a dozen articulated legs that clicked softly on stone.
It had no eyes, which I found appropriate — it didn’t need to see; it needed to sense.
When I walked too close to the estate’s outer wall, it turned toward me and made a sound like a tuning fork being struck.
I backed up.
It stopped.
“Good,” I said.
“But I’m not ready for you to be permanent yet.”
The idea of releasing something into the estate that I couldn’t reliably recall — that could outlast my intention — sat wrong with me.
I needed them to be able to disappear but not get recognised when I am not here.
Cloakable.
Self-effacing.
I released the prototype and added make invisible when alone to the ward construct specifications.
I’d circle back.
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